Tuesday, January 22, 2013

I've noticed recently that it's becoming more and more common to see websites with WAY too much CSS. I realized that I've never seen specific guidelines around how much CSS a website should have, and no clear narrative around the impact of total CSS transfer size. Most people just say "as little as possible" or "just write what you need and then optimize". On the whole I think these statements are a bit too vague to be useful. In addition, there are a lot of articles about "optimizing" CSS (a.k.a writing more efficient selectors), which has quickly diminishing returns. In this article I will talk specifically about how big your CSS files should be, and talk about some other possible pitfalls when authoring CSS.